Slightly OT: Hard Disk Backup program?

On Sun, August 30, 2009 17:25, John DeCarlo wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 12:08 AM, Richard Perry <perryrt at hotmail.com>
wrote:
>>> I need/want a hard drive backup solution....for my Inspiron 1420 and
three other Linux machines.
>>>> Linux/Ubuntu will do this several ways, but none of them really seem to
>> work the way I want them to. What I'm looking for is a program I can
>> start up either in the OS or by booting from a CD/USB, then will allow
me to make a complete copy of the entire drive - OS, configurations,
drivers, everything from soup to nuts and save it to a different
network drive. Then if it ALL goes horribly wrong, I want to be able to
boot my machine from a recovery CD/USB and pull back the image from the
network drive.
>>>> I would check out G4L.
>
I second the recommendation. I use it at home for all manner of machines
and OS's (mainly Fedora, Vista, XP, and OS X), and at work for a stable of
Red Hat, Windows, and Netware servers. It utterly does not matter what
OS, filesystem type, whatever. Compresses the image for speed and storage
efficiency, and the only real limitation is that the target restore drive
has to be at least as large as the one backed up if doing a whole drive
(can also do individual partitions). Under the hood, it's simplicity
itself. I've mimicked what it does on PPC Macs by booting Knoppix PPC,
mounting an NFS from another machine, and
dd if=/dev/sda|lzop > /mnt/image.lzop